Christianity
Are We Fundamentally Good?
Are We Fundamentally Good?
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When it comes to Pope Francis, the internet chomps at the bit to attack the Holy Father for anything. Whether it’s liberals bellyaching about him not being the champion of heretical progressivism or pseudo-traditionalists attempting to find anything in his words that might constitute a formal heresy, Pope Francis seems to be constantly criticized and misconstrued.
This time around, Pope Francis was decried by the vocal but theologically illiterate protestants on X. Their criticism revolved around his comments about man being “fundamentally good” in his recent 60-minute interview. Prominent figures such as Eric Metaxas, a protestant author who focuses on America’s culture war, claimed that if his statements were true, then “we don't need a Savior to die on the Cross,” and concluded that His Holiness was a heretic. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator who works for the Blaze, launched a barrage of misquoted verses from Scripture, attempting to affirm that Pope Francis believes in some kind of Pelagianism. Finally, Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler claimed that the Papacy is an “unbiblical office” and that Pope Francis is a heretic. These words, coming from people who can’t agree on the most basic fundamentals of Christian belief, are the height of absurdity, but I digress.
To give context, Nora O'Donnell, 60 Minutes correspondent, asked the Holy Father in the interview, “What gives you hope?” Pope Francis responded, "We are all fundamentally good. Yes, we are a little bit rogue and sinners, but the heart itself is good." To settle this debacle, the question is, are these words from Pope Francis’s words Christian Truth or heretical nonsense?
The Holy Father likely hears stories every day about Christian martyrs in Gaza or Nigeria suffering for the sake of the Gospel. He’s dealing with Catholics from around the world who give great witness to Jesus in their sufferings and heroic acts, not solely beige Americans who have a vague religiosity in their acts that involve being generically pleasant and donating a dollar to charity every so often.
Regardless, Pope Francis’s words are unequivocally the Truth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. God created human beings in His image, and He found His creation to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Despite the wickedness of men brought on by original sin, the image of God in every human being has never been destroyed. It can become distorted or obfuscated by the effects of original sin, but it can never be erased. Jesus Christ became incarnate so that we could become “sons of God” (Jn 1:12) and “sharers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4) because we were always made to be united with God in heavenly glory.
Pope Francis also readily affirmed the truth that the choice of man to commit evil originates not in the outside world but in an evil heart. In the Angelus of August 30, 2015, Pope Francis stated that “without a purified heart, one cannot have truly clean hands and lips which speak sincere words of love,” reflecting on Our Lord’s words to the Pharisees in Mark 7:15. He also spoke of how “the boundary between good and evil does not pass outside of us, but rather within us,” revealing that the Pope most certainly understands the role of original sin in mankind’s evil and how it is necessary to have the grace of Our Lord to maintain a clean heart.
So, if Pope Francis is repeating the sublime teaching of Our Lord, why is there such an uproar from protestants online?
Many in the low-church protestant world hold to the heresy of Calvinism, a bastard child of the “Reformation” that affirms man is totally depraved as a consequence of original sin and that this makes man corrupted to his very core. As a consequence of destroying the living Icon of Christ in the human person, the Calvinists see any affirmation of this image of God in man as akin to denying man’s sinfulness and the necessity of Christ as our salvation.
While much could be written about this wretched poison of Calvin, I want to stick to the few verses his followers attempted to use to slander Christ’s Vicar. The most prominent verse from Holy Scripture cited during the controversy was Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” As we demonstrated earlier, Pope Francis did not deny that the origin of mankind’s evil is in the heart, but how might this verse apply to his words about the heart being good?
The human heart, wounded by original sin, is twisted to be inclined towards evil, but the image of God in that same human heart is not abolished by concupiscence, making it good. This is why it is so powerful to call Christ our Redeemer. He reclaims what was created by God and lost to original sin to purify it to a higher life with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven. Another verse quoted was Mark 10:18, “No one is good but God alone.” This, again, is a bait and switch on the part of protestants to malign Pope Francis. By participating in the goodness that is God, the human heart can thus be good since nothing can be good apart from or not through Him alone. God made the heart, and the goodness He created it in cannot be destroyed, the nature of the heart is good. Finally, Ephesians 2:3 reads, “We all once lived in the passions of our flesh… so we were by nature children of wrath.” The verse here is speaking of how Christ, our Redeemer, freed us of the sordid state of sin we were once in, making us children of wrath. The term “nature” may easily be mistaken as saying that we are corrupted to the core, as Calvinists would affirm, but Saint Augustine easily destroys this conflation of terms.
We speak of “nature” in two ways. When speaking strictly of nature, we mean the nature in which humanity was originally created— after God’s image and without fault. The other way we speak of nature refers to that fallen sin nature, in which we are self-deceived and subject to the flesh as the penalty for our condemnation. The apostle adopts this way of speaking when he says, “for we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” (Saint Augustine, Commentary on Ephesians 2:3)
Augustine here makes a simple distinction that the nature spoken of in Ephesians 2:3 is not the nature of man as created in the image and likeness of God but rather the nature or state he inherits as a consequence of original sin. As demonstrated above, Pope Francis affirms this state of original sin, hence why he urged the “purification of the heart.”
The disciples of Jesus Christ will be hated since we follow the way of our Lord. “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.” (John 15:20). Pope Francis being Christ’s Vicar means that the world will seek to accuse him as they malign Christ. It is incumbent upon us to defend the servants of God as we would our Blessed Lord Himself.
This time around, Pope Francis was decried by the vocal but theologically illiterate protestants on X. Their criticism revolved around his comments about man being “fundamentally good” in his recent 60-minute interview. Prominent figures such as Eric Metaxas, a protestant author who focuses on America’s culture war, claimed that if his statements were true, then “we don't need a Savior to die on the Cross,” and concluded that His Holiness was a heretic. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator who works for the Blaze, launched a barrage of misquoted verses from Scripture, attempting to affirm that Pope Francis believes in some kind of Pelagianism. Finally, Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler claimed that the Papacy is an “unbiblical office” and that Pope Francis is a heretic. These words, coming from people who can’t agree on the most basic fundamentals of Christian belief, are the height of absurdity, but I digress.
To give context, Nora O'Donnell, 60 Minutes correspondent, asked the Holy Father in the interview, “What gives you hope?” Pope Francis responded, "We are all fundamentally good. Yes, we are a little bit rogue and sinners, but the heart itself is good." To settle this debacle, the question is, are these words from Pope Francis’s words Christian Truth or heretical nonsense?
The Holy Father likely hears stories every day about Christian martyrs in Gaza or Nigeria suffering for the sake of the Gospel. He’s dealing with Catholics from around the world who give great witness to Jesus in their sufferings and heroic acts, not solely beige Americans who have a vague religiosity in their acts that involve being generically pleasant and donating a dollar to charity every so often.
Regardless, Pope Francis’s words are unequivocally the Truth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. God created human beings in His image, and He found His creation to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Despite the wickedness of men brought on by original sin, the image of God in every human being has never been destroyed. It can become distorted or obfuscated by the effects of original sin, but it can never be erased. Jesus Christ became incarnate so that we could become “sons of God” (Jn 1:12) and “sharers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4) because we were always made to be united with God in heavenly glory.
Pope Francis also readily affirmed the truth that the choice of man to commit evil originates not in the outside world but in an evil heart. In the Angelus of August 30, 2015, Pope Francis stated that “without a purified heart, one cannot have truly clean hands and lips which speak sincere words of love,” reflecting on Our Lord’s words to the Pharisees in Mark 7:15. He also spoke of how “the boundary between good and evil does not pass outside of us, but rather within us,” revealing that the Pope most certainly understands the role of original sin in mankind’s evil and how it is necessary to have the grace of Our Lord to maintain a clean heart.
So, if Pope Francis is repeating the sublime teaching of Our Lord, why is there such an uproar from protestants online?
Many in the low-church protestant world hold to the heresy of Calvinism, a bastard child of the “Reformation” that affirms man is totally depraved as a consequence of original sin and that this makes man corrupted to his very core. As a consequence of destroying the living Icon of Christ in the human person, the Calvinists see any affirmation of this image of God in man as akin to denying man’s sinfulness and the necessity of Christ as our salvation.
While much could be written about this wretched poison of Calvin, I want to stick to the few verses his followers attempted to use to slander Christ’s Vicar. The most prominent verse from Holy Scripture cited during the controversy was Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” As we demonstrated earlier, Pope Francis did not deny that the origin of mankind’s evil is in the heart, but how might this verse apply to his words about the heart being good?
The human heart, wounded by original sin, is twisted to be inclined towards evil, but the image of God in that same human heart is not abolished by concupiscence, making it good. This is why it is so powerful to call Christ our Redeemer. He reclaims what was created by God and lost to original sin to purify it to a higher life with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven. Another verse quoted was Mark 10:18, “No one is good but God alone.” This, again, is a bait and switch on the part of protestants to malign Pope Francis. By participating in the goodness that is God, the human heart can thus be good since nothing can be good apart from or not through Him alone. God made the heart, and the goodness He created it in cannot be destroyed, the nature of the heart is good. Finally, Ephesians 2:3 reads, “We all once lived in the passions of our flesh… so we were by nature children of wrath.” The verse here is speaking of how Christ, our Redeemer, freed us of the sordid state of sin we were once in, making us children of wrath. The term “nature” may easily be mistaken as saying that we are corrupted to the core, as Calvinists would affirm, but Saint Augustine easily destroys this conflation of terms.
We speak of “nature” in two ways. When speaking strictly of nature, we mean the nature in which humanity was originally created— after God’s image and without fault. The other way we speak of nature refers to that fallen sin nature, in which we are self-deceived and subject to the flesh as the penalty for our condemnation. The apostle adopts this way of speaking when he says, “for we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” (Saint Augustine, Commentary on Ephesians 2:3)
Augustine here makes a simple distinction that the nature spoken of in Ephesians 2:3 is not the nature of man as created in the image and likeness of God but rather the nature or state he inherits as a consequence of original sin. As demonstrated above, Pope Francis affirms this state of original sin, hence why he urged the “purification of the heart.”
The disciples of Jesus Christ will be hated since we follow the way of our Lord. “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.” (John 15:20). Pope Francis being Christ’s Vicar means that the world will seek to accuse him as they malign Christ. It is incumbent upon us to defend the servants of God as we would our Blessed Lord Himself.